“Fool you who says / your future will be the mirror of this greatness.” The verse from Anna Maria Maiolino’s 1976 poem that opens the book AI-5 50 ANOS: ainda não terminou de acabar is an epigraph not only for the publication, but also for the situation in which Brazil finds itself today. To Paulo Miyada, the book’s organizer and curator of the exhibition that gave rise to it, “What we are living now is a burning aftermath of how profound the damage left by the years of military rule, compounded by the precarious character of democratic institutions that were not as revised and strengthened over the last three decades as it would have been necessary. ” The excerpt is present in the article Não terminou de acabar, which is part of the book and was originally published on the ARTE!Brasileiros platform in November 2018, under the subtitle As lacunas na memória brasileira e a extensão do AI-5 (the Gaps in Brazilian Memory and the Extension of AI-5).
At this juncture, gathering the material from one of the most important exhibitions of recent years in a book is a way of not allowing gaps to exist, recording the memory of physical form, with the collaboration of over 80 artists and authors in 600 pages of articles, texts about artists, facsimiles, images, among others. Made collaboratively, through donations, the collection of the necessary means for the production and printing of the publication was successful. It shows that a lot of people are not willing to forget
